Dave Hobson

Well disconnecting 16 drives (yes they're all internal) sata cables isn't exactly optimal but thinking about it I guess I could (memory permitting) move all the data outside of the PoolPart folders. Anyway I'm sensing it's seen as a non-issue so It's time to move on.

Well i did say on my initial post that I only ever use SSD optimizer. To be clear prior to the SSD optimizer install the screenshot is identical with the obvious exception that SSD optimizer is missing so no it didnt pick anything up.Each pool has it's own carefully thought out balancing. I use ordered file placement built into SSD optimizer, to cascade fill my my drives,. This is what it looks like for this one particular pool with the settings I chose. After a reinstall it activates all native balancers (as in the earlier screeshot). I get that and have no issue with it. What I have an issue with is that the actual balancing process is on by default. Maybe Im missing something but how exactly (with DP's defualt behaviour) on a new install do i get to the stage of this second screenshot without DP having already started throwing files around. If this is specific to the fact that I'm using SSD optimizer and that with the standard plugins EVERYTHING is remembered and would be exactly as it was prior to the OS reinstall then that's cool. But I'm not sure how that helps me while Balance immediately shown here is actually the default option. (I have changed it)

Sorry real life took over for a while. So you're saying that on, for example an OS reinstall, all balancing rules, file placement rules, including anything that's pertinent to the SSD optimizer plug in are stored on the pool , even though the service loads straight away after a reinstall AND therefore even before given the chance to actually reinstall the SSD optimizer plug-in.? If thats the case something is clearly going wrong for me. Even taking aside the SSD optimizer being installed or not, every single default balancer is enabled and the pool immediately reacts to those balancers and rules. I can assure you that prior to the reinstall every single balancer is disabled (excluding SSD Optimizer) on each and every pool and yet here is what i see on a fresh reinstall even after installing the SSD plugin.

Hey Drashna. OK. First off although I have been using DrivePool since WHS days when it was first discussed on WGS I have to admit I don't really follow the forums much. That's usually a good sign as well, it obviously just works. It's been so long in fact I have zero idea of my original username on here so please bear with me. So now to the crux. Does Drivepool yet have an option yet to backup configs for cases like OS reinstalls? If it does then I'm to blame and please accept my apologies for what I'm about to say.(User fail!!) If it doesn't then are you ever going to take seriously the issue that I personally at least twice have stated (over several years) , as have others that enabling any balancing by default on a fresh install is just about the most stupid thing I have ever seen. What is there? 5 or 6 balancers all enabled by default. So before the blink of an eye Drivepool is completely wrecking my painstakingly set up placement rules. Killing my carefully defragmented drives.(Awesome on 8x8TB drives and other drives too.) All this happens before any human can react to a single pool, let alone 5 and certainly well before I can install the only balancer I'm interested in (SSD Optimizer.) If the config backup exists then like I said it's my fault and I really need to visit the forums more. If it doesn't exist and its felt that allowing "anything" to happen by default on the Pools is a great Idea then that' fine too. Time to check out the alternatives. Sorry for my tone I'm pretty angry. Angrier still because I know from personal experience It's been brought up several times over several years. I can't believe that its easier to have 5 or 6 balancer active by default than it is to have all options dormant by default. As it happens so far I haven't turned on my external 8 bay case with another 3 pools so I'm not totally shafted. Before I do can I expect Drivepool to start throwing all those files around too then second I turn it on? That will just not be happening. At least if I do turn it on I will have first removed Drivepool and looked at DriveBender or something else. Yes I can probably get around this by... 1. Stopping the service 2. Moving all files on all drives outside the Poolpart folder. 3. Setting balancers & Plugins to MY needs. 4. Moving the files back to the poolpart folders. 5. Starting the service. Sorry but I should only need to do step 3. I prefer common sense to hacks. If the current way is regarded even remotely as common sense or it even needs considering (rather than immediately actioning) then It's definitely time to uninstall. Anything that ever removes, changes or moves a file on my system without my expressed permission I would class as malware. Bottom line is I'm mid reinstall so do I take those 5 steps on a total of 16 drives or see if the alternative will leave my files alone until I ask it to do otherwise. I'm really hoping I haven't spent several years backing the wrong horse.

Yeah, the 10TB are a little too high in price especially here in the U.K. I was just curious though. It only seems like a couple of years ago that everyone seemed to be suggesting never to use Seagates and to go with WD. Personally, I currently have 19 mechanical drives. All 19 are Seagate. As storage sizes increased and I upgraded I guess I would have owned around 40 Seagates over the years. I think I have had two Seagate drives die over the last 10-15 years. Whereas both the WD's I have owned died within 3 to 4 years.

Personally, I have no love for scene releases..but hey. Love the idea of multi-select. I wish it was implemented in far more apps/utilities than it is. Veering off topic again. I just noticed your server specs particularly your storage drives.... and I thought I was the only person in the world who loved Seagates. How are the 8TB Barracudas? I just had two delivered today but haven't put them into service yet.

No worries. Out of curiosity are you using torrents/newsgroups or is all your media self-ripped? If torrents, I moved away from syncing media when I discovered Sonarr & Radarr. Now one download client can send the files to my local server and up to my Gdrive. Anyways sorry, I'm getting off topic. Hope you find a solution.

Does Plex run locally or remotely or both? Which cloud provider? Though I agree that having the ability built-in to DrivePool would be awesome I was in a similar situation way back when I wanted to do a similar thing. Though in my case it was simply all on a local basis, but the same principle of only wanting to duplicate certain movies. What I found the easiest way was to create and then move the movies to a separate folder. In your case in the native client of your cloud provider. Something like Movies (being the original location) & Duplicated Movies (the newly created location). In Gdrive for example, this takes a couple of minutes as it's just drag and drop. EDIT: Oh wait. I'm guessing that you are perhaps using Stablebit CloudDrive itself and therefore when looking at your native cloud provider client, the files are encrypted and unreadable to the naked eye? In which case I'm sorry for wasting your time. Hopefully, If that's the case someone else will be able to help as I already had far too much unencrypted data on Gdrive to make use of CloudDrive when it was launched.

Yeah, I hear you, however, that's not gonna be possible in my case. I'm already kicking up close to 50-60TB of data and I only deal in Remux as a minimum quality as soon as the BluRay is released. Game of Thrones Season 1 has just hit my main tracker in UHD HDR so that's an immediate jump of an extra 100GB for a single season. I still have plenty of series yet that need to be upgraded to 1080p Remux let alone if they later become available in UHD HDR. I simply use Gdrive for redundancy but either way, redundancy isn't my concern. Data integrity is. So it's more the data scrubbing element of SnapRaid that interests me. That said, now I know I can use my soon to be redundant 4TB drives for parity It's a no-brainer.

That exactly so I think I will stick with NTFS for now. $169 dollars so that's about £125... Wow, like I said rip off Britain. That said the difference In prices between 8TB internal and external has diminished over here lately and both can be picked up for around £180. Oh, that's interesting. Its a while since I looked at Snapraid and the ability for split parity drives has definitely come since then. I'm not doubting you as I have just read several threads on various sites saying the same thing. That's just awesome. It's probably stupid NOT going down that route as I know I will have 4-6 4TB drives spare over the next few months. Thanks so much for your help everybody.

Thanks for all the awesome input everyone. I think I'm gonna say with NTFS. Especially as the SnapRaid site seemingly throws up some suggestions linking to this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_verification_software With regards to Shucking... Although as mentioned I have done this is the past (with 4TB drives when 4TB was the latest thing) the cost difference is negligible especially bearing in mind the reasons Christopher mentions and not an approach I want to return to. Though the cost isn't really the issue my current aim is to get rid of/repurpose some of those 4TB drives and replace them with another couple of 8TB drives. Maybe when that's done I will look again at SnapRaid and It's parity. If Google ever backtrack on unlimited storage at a stupidly low price in the same way Amazon did then it may scale higher on my priorities, but for now... EDIT Now I'm even more curious as I have just read a post on /r/snapraid suggesting that its possible to raid 0 a couple of pairs of 4TB drives and use them as 8TB parity drives. Though the parity would possibly less stable it would give me parity (even though it's not priority) and would allow for data scrubbing (my main aim) and mean that those 4TB drives wouldn't sit in a drawer gathering dust. So if any of you Snapraid users have any thoughts on this, I would be glad for any feedback/input..

Cool, I have wondered about SnapRaid and recall looking into it way back. I probably need to revisit it. That said redundancy isn't really an issue as all 50-60TB is mirrored directly to Gdrive. But if its a means to an end I may delve back into some research and refresh my memory. That said, I'm at 13 drives I think, so that's gonna be 2 x8TB drives to achieve this and being in rip-off Britain that's around £400. Granted it gives me parity also but that's not really my main concern. I will, however, look into it more on my next days off work. Thanks for the info.

Ah, something else I meant to ask about. Obviously, as I mentioned I'm kind of OCD about defragmentation, especially on the 8TB archive drives that I'm filling. Now because the nature of those drives is that they are filled once and done with, then ReFS kind of makes sense just for bit rot prevention. (Beyond that feature I don't really know about ReFS at all.) As a PerfectDisk user, when I fill a new drive the defrag map looks clean and reports no files are fragmented as expected or at least that's the case with NTFS. With ReFS though the exact same procedure shows EVERY single file as being fragmented (either 2 or 3 fragments for each movie or episode.)... and so my OCD kicked in and I went back to NTFS. I recently started thinking this is more to do with my lack of understanding or how ReFS works though or possibly it's just that PerfectDisk isn't fully ReFS friendly. I know it's not really anything to do with StableBit but I do know you use ReFS. So any brief answer from your knowledge would be a great help ease my OCD. It Kinda sucks that there is hardly any info on ReFS and fragmentation on any of the Microsoft sites I have looked at. So, in a nutshell, would you recommend ReFS (with 64K clusters) and just disable monitoring in PerfectDisk to eliminate my OCD I'm thinking 64K blusters because on these drives the files sizes are 5GB minimum up to probably 80GB. More than happy with a yes or no.

Yep, it rocks doesn't it. Back in the WHS/WHS (2011) days, I opted for Drivepool when reading up on both DP and DB on the WeGotServed forums. Honestly, its just sat there doing its job for all these years since. For me, things that just work so well that you almost forget you're using them are THE truly great apps. Granted I have recently had a bit of a moan but the issue I raised is already being looked at. Don't worry it's nothing truly catastrophic like data loss because that's something that has never happened with DrivePool since the very earliest release. (Unlike Storage Spaces.) There is no doubt whatsoever that in my 20 plus years of using a PC and purchasing various apps/programmes/subscriptions (many of which I don't even remember) nothing has come remotely close to the value for money that my DrivePool and Scanner licenses have offered. Over the years I have purchased a few licenses for various StableBit products not because I needed them. Simply because they don't take donations. So it's just an alternative way to support development. Awesome stuff indeed.